Assassin's Creed Valhalla - Dawn Of Ragnarök - Review

It’s been nearly two years since Ubisoft’s massive action RPG Assassin’s Creed Valhalla was released to much critical acclaim. Valhalla followed Ubisoft’s usual open world formula but offered enough new in game mechanics such as settlements to stave off any feelings that their tried and true formula might be becoming stale, Valhalla was a massive adventure with over 200 hours of content and everyone loves Vikings so it was no surprise the game was a big success. With the landscape (pun intended) of open world games continuously changing, especially with the release of games such as Elden Ring and the lack of hand holding it brings to the genre, is Assassins Creed and Ubisoft’s tried and tested open world formula still relevant or is it getting a bit long in the tooth?

Dawn Of Ragnarök is the third and most likely final DLC for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Ragnarök is more of a stand-alone game in price and size compared to an expansion, though it still does require you to own Valhalla in order to play it. Ragnarok’s timeline is set before the events portrayed in the original game and will find you playing as Havi, everybody’s favourite reincarnated Norse god. Taking place on the island of Svarfenheim the main narrative is that Havi/Odin/Eivor/It’s complicated son has been kidnapped by the evil fire demon Surtur and we must traverse the landscape of Svarfenheim in order to rescue him. Svarfenheim (I enjoy saying the word more than I do trying to type it without a spelling mistake) is a pretty vast environment, especially for a DLC, some of it are just reskinned assets from Valhalla but Ubisoft has generally done a good job here keeping the island feeling fresh and unique by featuring dwarven architecture throughout the landscape along with quite a few character models we have not seen before, it felt different enough to Valhalla to get my attention even if it couldn’t hold it for as long as I had hoped.

It is not just new scenery that is on offer here, Ragnarök also brings with it some new game mechanics and magical power for Havi to wield, this comes through the form of a magical bracer known as Hugr-Rip that allows you to absorb powers from certain enemies and add them to your arsenal, these powers range from stealth abilities such as disguising yourself as an enemy in order to infiltrate enemy encampments through to being able to walk through lava without suffering physical harm, I won’t spoil them all for you but the powers on offer here are really quite varied even if some of them are more of a novelty than others, the design of the power system is a little clunky though, you are able to wield two powers at one time, which is great however you can’t just swap around powers on the fly, changing powers causes you to lose the one you are replacing and in order to equip It again you need to find the enemy you originally absorbed it from and take it again, this felt tedious to me and I think it would’ve been much better if you could absorb powers from enemies and then select these from a list whenever a situation arose when they were needed. The Atgeir, a new weapon which would be best described as a polearm is also introduced and it allows you to build your own combos via use of the light and heavy attack buttons which does feel good with the weapon feeling very weighty and providing a good amount of range to attacks but ultimately it doesn’t add much of an impact at all to the overall combat system.

Your journey through Ragnarök will ultimately take around 16-30 hours depending on how much of a collector or achievement hunter you are, so you can’t really complain about value for money considering this is a DLC, there is a whole new massive island to explore, a new story to experience and new skills to experiment with, there is a lot of bang for your buck here. I enjoyed my time on the island of Svarfenheim playing through Ragnarök but it did start to become more of a chore towards the end of the storyline and I think this is mainly because AC Valhalla is such a massive game in the first place that I don’t think there was really any need for expansions, there is only so much developers can do to keep the game and mechanics feeling fresh and eventually it just feels like you are playing the same game but with a new skin.

That being said Ragnarök is one of the better expansions that have been released in the past few years and a fair amount of care has been taken to ensure that this doesn’t just feel like tacked on content. If you are a massive fan of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla then I would definitely open your wallet and add this to your collection, if you struggled to finish the original game though then I don’t think there is enough here to make a trip back to the world enjoyable enough for you to return.

The Score

7.5

Review code provided by Ubisoft

The Pros

+Massive new island to explore

+New skills and weapon type

+Story is satisfying and voice acting is superb

+Massive amount of content and value for money

The Cons

-Probably not enough here to bring back anybody that isn’t a massive AC fan

-Huge-Rip power system is great but unfortunately suffers from clunky mechanics